Two more obsolete East Side phone exchanges

I love this ad for Gnome Bakers, especially the tagline. How unusual could their bread and rolls have been? It comes from a 1973 New York Mets program.

The best part is the old RE phone exchange, assigned to phone numbers from a part of the Upper East Side starting in 1930. It stood for Regent—perhaps the name of a landmark hotel or theater nearby?

A good place to look for old phone exchange signs around the city is near service elevators. This one was spotted in east midtown around 35th Street.

JU is either for Judson, in Manhattan, or Juniper, given to a stretch of Queens.

If we knew the name of the elevator company, we could figure out which one. But alas, no trace of the name could be found.

The offensive statue kicked out of a city park

To artist Frederick MacMonnies, it probably sounded like a crowd-pleaser.

Commissioned in 1915 by the city to create a sculpture for City Hall Park, he carved a 55-ton piece of marble into “Civic Virtue”: a figure of a strapping young man holding a sword while standing astride two beautiful women, who symbolized vice and corruption.

“It represents virtue rising or overcoming temptation,” said Macmonnies.

But even before the 22-foot statue was unveiled in the park in 1922, it was under fire. Women’s groups claimed it was demeaning to have virtue represented by a male figure, while women were equated with vice.

MacMonnies found the argument ridiculous and blamed “literal” minded people who didn’t think allegorically. “Temptation is usually made feminine because only the feminine really attracts and tempts,” quoted the Times.

Mayor Hylan thought it was “a travesty of good taste,” but the statue went up anyway, earning the nickname “Rough Guy” because of his naked, chiseled, somewhat caveman-like features.

Throughout the 1920s, petitions were filed to have Civic Virtue removed, and in the 1930s, with City Hall Park set for a beautification project, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses stated that he wanted it gone.

By 1941, rumor had it that Mayor LaGuardia was tired of seeing Civic Virtue’s muscular butt from City Hall. The statue was banished to Queens Borough Hall, where it languished for seven decades.

Last year, Civic Virtue, falling apart and still lacking respect, found a new home: Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where officials plan to restore it.

[Photo at right: from the Bridge and Tunnel Club]

A WPA poster advertising a Queens roller rink

This WPA poster, part of a collection of posters digitized by the Library of Congress, must have been created in the early 1940s.

That’s because the New York City Building didn’t exist before the 1939 World’s Fair.

“After the World’s Fair, the building became a recreation center for the newly created Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The north side of the building, now the Queens Museum, housed a roller rink and the south side offered an ice rink,” the Queens Museum of Art website explains.

The pioneering birth control clinics of New York

The first clinic got its start in October 1916. It opened in a storefront on Amboy Street in working-class Brownsville, Brooklyn (left).

Fliers attracted 100 women on opening day.

“For ten cents each woman received [a] pamphlet What Every Girl Should Know, a short lecture on the female reproductive system, and instructions on the use of various contraceptives,” states this NYU website.

This was radical stuff a century ago. No wonder it only took days for the woman who started the clinic, social reformer and birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, to be arrested.

Sanger was charged with violating the Comstock Act. Established in 1873, it made discussing and administering birth control a crime.

Sanger spent a month in jail in Queens. But there was one upside: though an appeals court upheld her conviction, the judge determined that nothing in the Comstock Act prohibited doctors, rather than activists, from giving out contraception.

With this in mind, Sanger founded her second clinic, what she called the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, in 1923.

Staffed by MDs, the clinic disseminated information about contraception and offered birth control devices—serving more than 1,200 women in its first year, according to The Encyclopedia of New York State.

The clinic moved into this lovely circa-1846 row house at 17 West 16th Street in Chelsea in 1930.

“By the 1930s it served over 10,000 women per year and was the largest birth control clinic in the country,” the authors state.

For decades it was the only clinic giving out birth control to unmarried women, and interestingly, it treated men too. In 1969, it opened the first outpatient vasectomy center in the country.

After 50 years and a huge change in acceptance of birth control, the clinic closed in 1973. The 16th Street house is now a private home, albiet with a plaque designating it as a national historic landmark.

A proud lamppost guards the Queensboro Bridge

Right before the Manhattan-side entrance to the circa-1909 Queensboro Bridge is this beautiful bronze lamppost.

On its base is a sweet touch: the names of four boroughs (sorry Staten Island) carved into it, symbolizing the recently united city.

The lamppost no longer lights the way, but that’s okay.

Just the fact that it managed to survive more than a century is a significant achievement.

Here it is in a NYPL photo, left, dated 1910-1920.

It used to have a twin on the other side of the bridge entrance. That lamppost vanished in the 1970s, but no one knew what had happened to it (theft? Moved to make way for the Roosevelt Island Tram?)—until it was found in a Department of Transportation signal yard in Queens last year.

The Roosevelt Island Historical Society plans to restore it and display it there, next to a renovated trolley kiosk once part of the bridge.

Bridges and barracks in an East River postcard

This 1940s technicolor postcard shows the sturdy Triborough (aka the Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge in the foreground and the stunning Hell Gate Bridge, which carries rail traffic, behind it.

It’s only one leg of the Triborough though; the bridge connects the Bronx to Manhattan to Queens—leapfrogging over the joined-via-landfill Randall’s and Ward’s Islands.

I’m curious about the barracks-like white and red buildings in the background on what looks like Randall’s and Ward’s Islands. In the 1930s, the island became home to a psychiatric hospital that still operates today; it replaced an older insane asylum.

Are these barracks part of the psych hospital—or used as housing for some other group of people the city didn’t want in Manhattan or the the other boroughs?

New York City’s sea mythology street names

Tracing the origins of the city’s street names can be fascinating.

Some come from Dutch place names (“Flushing” is thought to have started out as “Vlissingen”), local landowners (Delancey and Warren), or the nearby landscape (Myrtle Avenue had lots of, well, Myrtle bushes).

A handful have their origins in ancient mythology. Neptune Avenue comes from the Roman god of the seas—very appropriate for the avenue running parallel to the ocean in Coney Island and Brighton Beach.

Nereid Avenue in the Bronx is more mysterious. Nereids are the sea nymphs of Greek mythology, who assisted sailors fighting storms and fishermen desperate for a catch.

Thing is, this avenue, a stop on the 2 and 5 trains, isn’t near the sea. So why does a landlocked slice of the Bronx reference water goddesses?

Apparently a volunteer fire company once existed here, according to a book called History in Asphalt by Bronx historian John McNamara—and the Nereid reference has to do with firefighters using water.

What’s a trolley station doing off second avenue?

Because subways and cars were doing a better job transporting people around the five boroughs, officials phased out the city’s trolleys by the 1950s.

Yet strangely, they forgot to dismantle at least one trolley kiosk.

Since 1957, it’s sat alone (and recently fenced off) on a concrete island off Second Avenue and 60th Street, where the Queensboro Bridge approach begins.

This little kiosk, with its terra cotta panels and copper roof, was once one of five serving passengers on the Manhattan side of the bridge.

Each sheltered a staircase leading to an undergound trolley station that took commuters to Roosevelt Island or into Queens.

You can still see the Entrance and Exit signs on the kiosk, which has been repainted recently—though the staircase has been removed and the floor is solid concrete.

“The trolley terminal is now used by the Department of Transportation to store trucks and equipment, but the streetcar portals can still be seen from the lower roadways of the bridge, just east of Second Avenue,” notes a 1998 New York Times article.

The racing sport that once thrilled New York

Bike racing is mostly an outdoors activity now, and it doesn’t have the most thrilling rep.

But from the 1890s to the 1920s, an amped-up indoor version of the sport was one of the most popular attractions in the city.

Grueling races were held in huge indoor tracks. Madison Square Garden (left, in 1928), then on 26th Street and Madison Avenue, was an early venue.

Cyclists would pedal at top speed on oval wooden tracks, sometimes for days, resulting in spectacular, NASCAR-like crashes.

Newspapers printed racing results—when they weren’t decrying the brutality of the sport.

“An athletic contest in which the participants ‘go queer’ in their heads, and strain their powers until their faces become hideous with the tortures that rack them, is not sport, it is brutality,” opined The New York Times in 1897.

But fans loved the drama, and racing arenas called velodromes popped up.

The New York Velodrome (above) was built on Broadway and 225th Street in 1921, seating 16,000 fans.

The Coney Island Velodrome (left) also opened in the 1920s, hosted 10,000 fans, who watched racers fly along 45-degree banked corners.

So what sank the sport? It took a huge hit in the Depression. In the 1930s, both New York tracks burned down, and indoor cycling never recovered.

Today, there is one velodrome left in New York, built in 1962: in Kissena Park in Queens.

[Top photo: NYPL Digital Collection; middle: myinwood.net]

The dates on top of old New York buildings

It’s lovely to look up at the top of a residence, church, or factory and see the year the structure went up in bold numerals.

Too bad developers no longer date their buildings—it helps give a sense of how the city evolved.

I love the style of the “1891″ on top of 451 Washington Street. Now it’s a co-op, but it started out as the Fleming Smith Warehouse, where wine was stored.

This handsome clock tower crowns the former Sohmer Piano Factory on Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City. Built in 1886, the company stayed there almost a century, decamping for Connecticut in 1982.

“Established 1890″ this Hell’s Kitchen tenement tells us. But what was established—just the building? Or a specialty business? No clues survive.

The Esther Apartments at 126 Ludlow Street date to 1930. I guess the faux Hebrew lettering helped attract renters in a heavily Jewish neighborhood?